LETCHWORTH-A CITY MADE TO ORDER

...The modern city, like Topsy, "just growed...

...The chief cause of this low death rate is not far to seek...

...In London in 1901 over seven hundred thousand persons were living in terribly overcrowded dwellings, and families (representing over three hundred thousand persons) were living in dwellings of one room...

...the land was allowed to fall into the hands of private speculators, who held breathing space at a monopoly price, and crowded human beings together under conditions destructive of health and msrals...

...There is nothng of the sort...

...To attain this end it was necessary to have one central will, one denned plan, instead of leaving the future of the city to chance and to the profit seeking of thousands of individuals...

...Intemperance and lunacy are greatest where the over-crowding is greatest, and tuberculosis finds its home in the congested areas...

...Letchworth is Beautiful BUT IT MAY BE ASKED: "Is not all this planning destructive of beauty and originality...

...The farmer situated on the Letchworth belt can daily drive to town with eggs and milk and butter and vegetables and the proximity of the city will give a money value to the land, just as the proximity of the land will give a health value to the city...

...It is never to exceed a population of thirty-five thousand...

...These two square miles will very comfortably house thirty-five thousand people in detached dwellings, with gardens, and public play-grounds, parks and other open spaces...

...Later when I visited Hampstead, Ealing and other beautiful Garden Suburbs, I saw that the principles of cooperative city and suburb building did not depend on the one experiment at Letchworth...

...Of eleven thousand men who offered themselves for military service in the over-crowded city of Manchester, eight thousand were rejected as unfit...

...houses were permitted to be built on the principle of packing boxes...

...It has adhered to graceful curves...

...The shops, the banks, the schools, the public buildings, the churches, the parks, the play-grounds, the open squares, all have suitable and defined locations...

...In Letchworth, garden walls are not permitted...

...Is there not something mechanical and geometrical about it all...

...The city was everywhere becoming self-conscious...

...In 1899, Mr...

...In the year 1100, the place had a few hundred inhabitants...

...He saw no hope in the country districts, for England is, and must remain, primarily a manufacturing country, a country of cities...

...The future increases in value and rent will go into public improvements, into the further beautifying of the town, into the making of a full and liveable life for coming generations...

...It is intended to make as few changes as possible in the years to come...

...It is constantly tearing up its streets to make changes in the city which were not foreseen a decade or two ago...

...His idea was thaft the new city should be carefully planned so that work and housing should be kept separate, so that each function of the city should be performed where it could best be performed...

...Letchworth was nothing, it was the principle of Letchworth that was all conquering...

...The principle of Letchworth is that every citizen shall enjoy the utmost possible freedom consistent with the equal freedom of his neighbors, but that no citizen may in the pursuit of his own gain conduct himself so as to injure his fellow citizens or diminish the beauty, healthfulness and civic progress of the Garden City...

...The city is planned as a house is planned...

...Ltd., consummated the purchase of 3,814 acres (or almost six square miles) about the pretty village of Letchworth, Herts...

...The City Belongs to the People NOW THIS single plan could have been obtained in either of two ways...

...Of the six square miles of Letchworth only two are to be built upon...

...The roads, streets and avenues are laid out in advance, each being given a width adapted to its probable needs...

...In the year 1900, its population was no greater...

...It has cultivated vistas...

...Manufacturers were encouraged to establish works in the new city, and workmen, professional men, tradesmen and other prospective residents were encouraged to come...

...Letchworth is, in certain essential respects, the nearest approach we yet have to the City of Tomorrow...

...By WALTER E. WEYL, Ph...

...The cities of Britain, like those of Germany, France, Austria, the United States and other countries, are beginning to see that overcrowding means death, deterioration and degeneration...

...is the whole body of tenants, present and prospective...

...The gas mains, wires, pipes and other underground connections, are put in before (and not after) the street is paved...

...Some of these buildings were put up by the Garden City Company and leased to individuals, and others were built by private persons, under a ninety-nine years' lease of the land...

...They have clubs and institutes and social gatherings and lectures, in which people are not kept apart by the accident of one being richer than his neighbor...

...When that time comes the citizens of Letchworth will own the city and all that it contains free from encumbrances...

...It might have been the plan of a benevolent despot who would build the city for "his people" and determine how they should live, or it might have been the plan of the inhabitants themselves, united in some form of democratic, business organization...

...Modern City "Just Growed" IT IS HARD for us to realize how widely this planning of a city differs from the ordinary way in which most cities have been allowed to develop...

...He was alarmed at the unregulated growth of great cities, which become overcrowded, insanitary and destructive of the lives of the people...

...The city, however, has grown...

...The cities of Holland and Germany were foresightedly buying great tracts of land in their neighborhood, so as to determine the lines and manner of their own growth, independent of the landowner and the land speculator...

...A cat may look at a king, but a poor man may not look at a rich man's garden, even through a gate...

...In a thousand ways the city loses in money and in the health, vitality and even the lives of its citizens from its unregulated growth, its planlessness, its lack of prevision...

...The ultimate landlord is the Garden City Ltd., and the Garden City Ltd...

...Its factories are shut off in one corner of the city, at a spot adjoining the railroad, and in the direction opposite to that of the prevailing wind...

...The city has a character of its own...

...For all time Letchworth is to have the country at its doors...

...The city was laid out...

...Why Letchworth is Healthful IT IS ALSO MORE HEALTHFUL...

...Within a few hundred yards of buildings erected in 1911, one comes across weather-beaten cottages, with their thick straw thatches and antique doors, cottages which housed the Letchworth villagers in the days of Cromwell and for hundreds of years before...

...Everything to the last detail is foreseen...

...In its turn the agricultural belt should prosper by the rise within its centre of a city with thirty-five thousand consumers...

...During the last year its death rate was only 5.2 per thousand as compared with a rate about three times as high in Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham...

...The constant expenses of the city will be divided among a larger number of citizens...

...Real Neighborhood Spirit IN ENGLISH COUNTRY TOWNS and suburbs, one is constantly confronted with the high wall, sometimes covered by broken glass, which not only encloses the rich man's land, but ensures his "privacy" by preventing outsiders even from seeing his garden...

...Letchworth, because of its origin, is freer I believe, from the curse of snobbery than is any other town in England...

...The workingmen's csttages, splendidly built and with a maximum of light and air, are within a few hundred yards of the factories, but are separated by a wide boundary of grass...

...Letchworth, in England, is different...

...A City That Will Never be Crowded BUT IT MAY BE ASKED: "Will not Letchworth also be crowded as it increases in numbers...

...You realize this the moment yoia step off at the station after the rapid run of thirty-four miles from London...

...The city might belong to a philanthropist, or it might belong to the people...

...But within fifteen or twenty years, the population should grow to its maximum of thirty-five thousands...

...The overcrowding of the city spells physical deterioration, moral degeneration and civic anarchy...

...For the time being, it is true, there are many stockholders in the Garden City Company, who are not residents of Letchworth, and many non-resident bondholders...

...Fortunately, however, the deficit has rapidly diminished and during the present year, it is expected to disappear altogether, and permit the payment of dividends...

...Similarly, if you go to England in these early days of the twentieth century, you might very likely spend all your thought on London, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, the spreading cities of today, and quite overlook the little town of Letchworth, which in certain essential respeets is the nearest approach we yet have, to the City of To-morrow...

...In Glasgow, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Dublin and Birmingham the conditions were as bad or worse, while in New Castle, Gateshead, Sunderland and in the counties of Durham and Northumberland, one third of the total population, urban and rural, lived in over-crowded houses...

...It was the result of the idea of one man...

...It has encouraged originality of design, but has repressed all flaring exaggerations in execution...

...There is no private landlord to raise rents as population increases, to crowd house upon house and tenant upon tenant, to grow rich doing nothing, while the city expands...

...Letchworth has preserved all its old trees, its firs, its poplars and its beautiful elms, which had attained a growth long before Thomas Jefferson signed the Declaration of Independence...

...The results are frightful...

...Its streets are not the rectangular lines of Philadelphia or Chicago, nor the tangles of Boston and London...

...The latter alternative was chosen by the originator of the Letchworth idea and by the group of able men, who, associating themselves with him, took over the actual conduct of the enterprise...

...Letchworth is beautiful at present and will be more beautiful in the future...

...The modern city has not been able to avoid the slum, because it did not foresee it...

...He planned a new country-city, a garden city, which would offer the industrial, educational and social opportunities of the city, and the healthfulness, the placid beauty and the low rents of the country...

...Today there are seven thousand inhabitants, and the city is growing at the rate of from one thousand to two thousand a year...

...The City of Tomorrow AS I RETURNED from Letchworth to the congestion, the misery and the anarchic planlessness of London, as I saw again the blanched faces of little children, both unfed and unhoused, I became sickened with a sudden sense of the littleness of the Garden City and the hugeness of Babylon...

...Roads were built, water mains, gas mains and sewers were laid, and houses and factories, erected...

...D. IP YOU HAD BEEN a "personally conducted" traveller in Rome during the second century of the Christian era, you might very possibly have spent all your time in admiring the resplendent and magnificent Pagan temples, and have overlooked the scattered chapels of an obscure and despised sect, with whese fortunes Rome's fame and Rome's tradition were thereafter to be indissolubly linked...

...This also has been foreseen in the planned city...

...In the year 1903, the First Garden City...

...They have been very patient investors, for during these early years there has been an annual deficit, as was to have been anticipated in a scheme which required great expenditure at the beginning...

...the land was allowed to fall into the hands of private speculators, who held breathing space at a monopoly price, and crowded human beings together under conditions destructive of health and morals...

...Seven thousand people can live comfortably and with elbows free on six square miles of territory, but what will happen when a hundred thousand or five hundred thousand throng the Garden City...

...The other houses are not cramped or huddled, nor are they built with a complete independence of one another, but are arranged in clusters and groups, with an infinite variety, but with an attempt at harmony...

...All—Not the Few—Get the Benefits TO THE CITIZENS of today and tomorrow, to the citizens in their corporate capacity, all these values will eventually come...

...In the churches and schools (for there are already excellent schools in Letchworth) this democratic social intercourse is furthered...

...Letchworth is a town made to order...

...But after all it was not numbers alone that counted...

...This progress has been made while the young city has grown from a population of a few hundreds to one of seven thousand...

...the total amount of rents will enormously increase, and the surplus over dividend will, it is hoped, within a reasonable time, wine out all the bonds and retire all the stock...

...Its rate of infant mortality is also very low...

...How was this accomplished...

...Letchworth's seven thousand could easily be lost in this city of seven millions...

...Ebenezer Howard wrote a book describing the Garden Cities of to-morrow...

...It is to be saved from contact with the slums and evil tenements which would surely spring up around it, if it were to grow to the very limits of its land...

...There is not, and can not be, any overcrowding in Letchworth...

...The cities of England were asking and receiving new powers to enable them to plan their future growth as American and German eities were beginning to do...

...In a sense it is a new city, the very newest thing in cities, but is built around a very old place, a little cluster of buildings upon a site already occupied eight hundred and thirty years ago...

...In either case there were restrictions as to the character and number of buildings to be erected, and as to the use to which the land was to be put...

...Letchworth has avoided straight lines...

...Of their own accord the Letchworth people have established a community of social interest...

...That principle, as I came to see, was the substitution ,pf a city plan for city planlessness, of a common will for a conflict of individual wills, of the dignity and beauty of the new city, for the anarchy of those which simply grew up around factories and wharves...

...These men who are to receive respectively five and four per cent, annually upon their capital, have been attracted both by the broad spirit of the enterprise and by the assurance that with each increase in population, the value of the land rises and their security improves...

...It was retrieving, as far as possible, its ancient errors and planlessness, and it was looking to the future with a manifest determination to remake itself to order, and to direct its own growth along the lines of beauty, symmetry, healthfulness, and the greatest good of coming generations of citizens...

...It is to have the vivifying touch of the open land...

...But this urban part of Letchworth is always to be surrounded by a belt of twenty-five hundred acres of land...

...Letchworth is never to attain this huge population...

...There was everywhere a new attitude towards the city...

...The average death rate, though declining, is still excessive, especially in the more over-crowded districts...

...You see immediately that Letchworth is made ox a single plan...

...There are low fences and in some parts of the city adjoining dwellings are separated by beautiful flowering hedges, which add to, rather than detract from, the charming large vistas which meet one at every turn...

...In Birmingham schools the boys are four inches shorter and three inches narrower in chest measurement than in the schools of the model village of Mournemouth...

...Howard believed that the divorce between the country and city was harmful to both...

...The ordinary city is constantly tearing down at a frightful expense, in order to secure a park or play-ground which it might originally have had for nothing...